Conventional surveillance systems generally use cameras with individual pan/tilt/zoom mechanisms, meaning that they either provide a wide field of view at low resolution, which makes it difficult or impossible to identify individuals, or a narrow field of view at high resolution, which means that situational awareness outside the field of view is lost. Worse, the spatial resolution of images acquired by conventional surveillance systems varies with the distance to the target and the particular optical arrangement of the cameras. Thus, not all imagery collected by conventional surveillance systems is suitable for target tracking, pattern (face) recognition, etc.